Prunus luxurians: A new species of Cherry from southwestern Ecuador.

The genus Prunus has a worldwide distribution and contains several important food crops (including Cherries, Almonds, and Plums), ornametal species (Blossom Cherries), timber souces (e.g. Black Cherry) and medicinal Plants (e.g. African Cherry). There are thought to be about 450 valid species in the genus, but the situation is complicated with about 1230 species described within the genus, and over 2000 more in other genera that have since been synonymised with it (i.e. genera which have had all their putative members moved into Prunus. 

Historically, it has been thought that the majority of Prunus species are found in the northern temperate belt, with a smaller number of species found at high altitudes in tropical and subtropical zones. However, recent research has discovered that the genus is much more widespread in lowland tropical forests than previously realised, particularly in the Americas, raising the possibility that the genus is more diverse in these regions than in the temperate zone.

In a paper published in the journal PhytoKeys on 4 April 2025, Álvaro Pérez of the Herbario QCA at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Jorge Andrés Pérez-Zabala of the Herbario Gabriel Gutiérrez Villegas at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Katya Romoleroux, also of the Herbario QCA at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, David Espinel-Ortiz, again of the Herbario QCA at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, and of the Bonn Institute of Organismic Biodiversity at the University of Bonn, and Chaquira Romoleroux and Natasha Albán-Vallejo, once again of the Herbario QCA at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, describe a new species of Prunus from southwestern Ecuador.

The new species is described from a small population of trees discovered in a cloud forest remnant in the Sambotambo Birón area of the Jocotoco Foundation-managed Reserve Buenaventura in El Oro Province, on the western flank of the Andes, between 1300 and 1400 m above sealevel. The new species is named Prunus luxurians, in reference to its 'profuse blooming and outstanding beauty', which makes it a conspicuous part of the lower and mid-strata of the forest.

Prunus luxurians: (A) Habit, (B branch with leaves and floriferous shoots, (C) flowers. Álvaro Pérez in Pérez et al. (2025).

Prunus luxurians forms trees up to 11 m high, with grooved dark brown bark with lighter lenticles (raised pores). Leaves are oblong-to-lance-shaped, waxy, and grow on alternating sides of leaf stems, they are 10–13.65 cm long and 3.5–4.65 cm wide. Flowers are white with light green centres, and born on floriferous shoots, which can have 14–27 individual flowers, clusetered together in groups of 3-4.

Only five living trees were found, in a fragment of montane evergreen forest, with high levels of bith diversity and endemism. The remaining forest fragments in this region are considered to be threatened by mining and farming activities, for which reason Pérez et al. recomend that Prunus luxurians be classified as Critically Endangered under the terms of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.

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Sorbus cibagouensis: A new species of Rowan from Tibet.

Trees and shrubs of the genus Sorbus are found across temperate the regions of Europe, Asia, and North America, where they are variously known as Rowans, Whitebeams, Service Trees or Mountain Ashes. They are members of the Rose Family, Rosaceae, and produce brightly coloured berries, which are consumed by Birds, helping to spread their seeds.

In a paper published in the Nordic Journal of Botany on 25 January 2017, Zhijian Yin, Mingxu Zhao, Fanglin Tang, and HongYan Sun of the China Forest Exploration and Design Institute and the Southwest Monitoring Center of Natural Reserve and Wildlife of the State Forestry Administration of the Peoples Republic of China, and Hua Peng of the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, describe a new species of Sorbus from the Cibagou National Nature Reserve in Zayü County in southeast Tibet.

The new species is named Sorbus cibagouensis, meaning 'from Cibagou'. It is a small tree, reaching about 6 m in height, with dark grey to black bark, leaves reaching 19 cm in length, but split into distinct leaflets, and produce white blossom. The species was found growing in a mixed conifer and broadleaved forest at an altitude of between 2600  and 2950 m above sealevel, though its distribution is not really known.

Sorbus cibagouensis, wild plant. Zhao Mingxu in Yin et al. (2017).

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Understanding the role of Bears in enabling a Cherry tree to migrate up mountains.

The Earth's climate is known to fluctuate over time, requiring animals and plants to move in order to find suitable habitats. For animals this is a fairly easy task, since most animals constantly move in search of the optimum environments during their lives, however for plants this is much more problematic, as they live the majority of their lives rooted to a single spot, with dispersal only occuring during the seed stage. One way to track optimum conditions in a changing climate without traveling vast distances is to move up and down slopes, since on average a 100 m rise in altitude coresponds to a -0.65 °C drop in temperature. However, while a seed can easily move downslope throgh gravity or water dispersal, seeds cannot fall upslope, requiring the plant to find more creative ways to move seeds uphill.

In a paper published in the journal Current Biology on 25 April 2016 a team of scientists led by Shoji Naoe of the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute examine the dispersal of the seeds of the Hill Cherry, Prunus verecunda, in Central Japan via two animal vectors, the Asiatic Black Bear, Ursus thibetanus and the Japanese Marten, Martes melampus.

Oxygen isotope ratios in plant tissue can be closely related to altetude, enabling Naoe et al. to estimate the altitude at which the trees that produced Cherry stones found in Bear and Marten droppings had been growing. Surprisingly they found that both species preferentially moved the seeds upwards, with Bears moving them an average of 749.5 m upslope and Martens 460.5 m, close to the maximum distance a foraging member of each species would be expected to travel between eating the fruit and excreting their stones.

The Hill Cherry produces fruit in spring-to-summer, with trees lower on the slope producing flowers, fruit and leaves earlier in the season. Bears, which were responsible for moving 80.3% of the Cherry seeds, have previously been shown to move upslope over the season enabling them to access fruit throughout the season. Naoe et al. suggest that the preferential movement of Bears and Martend uphill between consuming Cherries and defacating may reflect a daily feeding cycle, with the animals feeding first on the fruit, then moving upslope to forrage on herbs and young vegetation that cannot be accessed beneath the canopy of fruiting trees.

Vertical seed dispersal toward the mountain tops by mammals that are following the springto summer plant phenology. The spring-to-summer plant phenology proceeds from the foot to the top of mountains. Cherry fruits and young vegetation are no longer available in low altitudes, ripe fruits are available but young vegetation is no longer available in middle altitudes, and ripe fruits are unavailable but young vegetation is available in high altitudes. Naoe et al. (2016).

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Prunus kunmingensis: Peaches from the Late Pliocene of Yunnan Province.                 Peaches, Prunus persica, are widely grown and consumed fruit around the world today, with a total annual production of about 20 million tons. They have a long historical association with humans, particularly in East Asia, with the oldest known...

Changes in the diet of Brown Bears on Hokkaido.                                                           Expanding Human populations have been the major factor affecting almost all of the Earth’s ecosystems since the end of the last glaciation. Human activity has altered food...

Worker killed by Bear at Alberta oil sands site.                                                                   A worker was killed in an attack by a Bear at an oil sands excavation site operated by Suncor Oil, about 25 km north of Fort McMurray in Alberta Province, Canada, around mid-afternoon on Wednesday 7...

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Prunus kunmingensis: Peaches from the Late Pliocene of Yunnan Province.

Peaches, Prunus persica, are widely grown and consumed fruit around the world today, with a total annual production of about 20 million tons. They have a long historical association with humans, particularly in East Asia, with the oldest known archaeological specimens from 7000-8000 year-old sites in China and Peaches being mentioned in Chinese literature from about 1100 BC onwards. However today all known populations of Peaches are domesticated; no similar species is known from the wild, nor been documented in the fossil record. This makes it unclear to what extent modern Peaches resemble their wild ancestors and how much they have been modified by cultivation.

In a paper published in the journal Nature: Scientific Reports on 26 November 2015, Tao Su of the Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden and the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Peter Wilf of the Department of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, Yongjiang Huang, also of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and of the Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Shitao Zhang of the Faculty of Land Resource Engineering at the Kunming University of Science and Technology and Zhekun Zhou, also of the Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden and of the Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia at the Kunming Institute of Botany describe a series of Peach specimens from the Late Pliocene Ciying Formation at Kunming in Yunnan Province, China.

 The specimens comprise eight Peach endocarps (stones), apparently identical to those of modern Peaches. This being the case extreme care had to be taken to exclude the possibility of modern contamination. examination of the specimens determined that much of the original woody material had been replaced by iron oxides; attempts to obtain carbon-14 dates from the surviving woody material found them to be beyond the range of this method (about 43 500 years), effectively excluding the possibility of the specimens being modern. The specimens were slightly flatter than modern Peach stones, but this is thought to be a result of compression after burial, however due the presumed age of the specimens they are assigned to a new species, Prunus kunmingensis (meaning 'from Kungming') rather than to the modern Prunus persica.

 Prunus kunmingensis. (a–e) Original specimens.  (f) CT scan showing longitudinal section and seed. Scale bar is 1 cm. Su et al. (2015).

The discovery of the Kungming Peaches strongly suggests that Peaches with an essentially modern form have existed long before Humans domesticated them; modern Humans arrived in China  in the Late Pleistocene and are not thought to have started cultivating crops for some time after. The earlier Homo erectus, who are not thought to have practiced agriculture of any kind, appeared in East Asia about 1.9 million years ago, or about 700 000 years after the end of the Pliocene, indicating that Peaches predate even this species of human. It is therefore likely that Peaches relied upon a large non-human Mammal to spread their seeds before the arrival of Humans in the area, possibly some form of Ape.

Other fossil material from the same beds as the Peach specimens indicate that the climate of Kunming was warmer and wetter in the Late Pliocene, which is in keeping with what is predicted from climatic models for the period. The Ciying Formation has produced numerous acorns of Ring-cupped Oak, Quercus glauca, a species today found in tropical and subtropical forests in Asia. These forests are a biodiversity hotspot for fruit bearing Rosaceae trees today, with Apples, Almonds, Apricots, Cherries, Plums and Pears all thought to be native to such forests. The addition of Peaches to this list adds to the importance of these forests as a source of fruit crops utilized by Humans. 

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The origin of the ‘King of Flowers’.                  The Domestic Tree Peony, Paeonia suffruticosa, has a long history of cultivation in China, where records of the plant growing in gardens go back at least 1400 years. Domestic Tree Peonies are noted for their beauty and fragrance, and are known as the ‘King of Flowers’ in...

 

A new species of Whitebeam from the Transdanubian Mountains of Hungary.       Trees and shrubs of the genus Sorbus are variously known as Rowans, Service Trees, Whitebeams and Mountain Ashes. They are members of the Rose Family (Rosaceae), found in Europe, Asia, North America and North Africa. The group contains between 100 and...

A new species of Cherry from central Zhejiang Province, China.                                    Cherries are flowering fruit trees in the genus Prunus, members of the Rose Family (Rosaceae), found across much of the Northern Hemisphere, related to Plums, Peaches, Apricots and Almonds. Many species...

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A new species of Whitebeam from the Transdanubian Mountains of Hungary.

Trees and shrubs of the genus Sorbus are variously known as Rowans, Service Trees, Whitebeams and Mountain Ashes. They are members of the Rose Family (Rosaceae), found in Europe, Asia, North America and North Africa. The group contains between 100 and 200 species, many of which are hybrids, able to reproduce asexually and therefore propagate themselves. All the trees produce white flowers in spring and red, orange or yellow berries in autumn; the hybrid species do so without pollination taking place.

In a paper published in the journal Phytotaxa on 11 April 2014, Lajos Somlyay of the Hungarian Natural History Museum and Alexander Sennikov of the Botanical Museum of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and the Herbarium of the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, describe a new hybrid species of Sorbus from western Hungary.

The new species is named Sorbus udvardyana, after László Udvardy, a distinguished Hungarian botanist who died in 2010. Sorbus udvardyana is a shrub or small tree producing brown shoots and dark green leaves and flowering in May. Its fruit are orangey brown. It was found growing in the Transdanubian Mountains, notably the western part of the Balaton Uplands, the western part of the Bakony Mountains,  and the eastern part of the Keszthely Mountains, typically growing as a solitary tree on cliffs or gravel slopes. 

A fruiting branch of Sorbus udvardyana. Somlyay & Sennikov (2014).

Sorbus udvardyana is thought to be a hybrid of Sorbus aria and another, unknown member of the genus (making it a Whitebeam). Somlyay & Sennikov estimate that it should be classed as Threatened under Hungarian law, and therefore given legal protection, and Vulnerable under the terms of the International Union for the Protection of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.

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 A new species of Cherry from central Zhejiang Province, China.

 New species of Vochysia from Brazil.

 A new species of Custard Apple from the Western Ghats Mountains of India.

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A new species of Cherry from central Zhejiang Province, China.

Cherries are flowering fruit trees in the genus Prunus, members of the Rose Family (Rosaceae), found across much of the Northern Hemisphere, related to Plums, Peaches, Apricots and Almonds. Many species are cultivated, particularly for their fruit but also their wood, which is hard and has a reddish tint and is valued by furniture makers., some species are also grown as ornamentals due to their extensive pink of white blossom. The fruit of a Cherry is technically called a drupe; a fleshy fruit with a single large seed (the stone).

In a paper published in the journal PLoS One on 18 January 2013, a group of scientists led by Zi-Lin Chen of the College of Life & Environment Sciences at Hangzhou Normal University and the Zhejiang Dapanshan National Natural Reserve describe a new species of Cherry discovered growing wild in the Dapanshan Reserve.

The new species is named Prunus pananensis, after Pan’an County, where the Dapanshan reserve is located. It is a deciduous tree reaching 8 m in height, having brown bark with grey or white lenticels (breathing pores on the trunk). It's leaves are 4-12 cm in length, and it produces white blossom, which appears in spring before the leaves. The fruit os red or black. The identity of the tree as a new species was confirmed by DNA analysis. 

Black (top) and red (bottom) fruit of Prunus pananensis. Scale bars are 1 cm. Chen et al. (2013).

Blossom of Prunus pananensis. Scale bars are 2 cm (C) and 1 cm (D). Chen et al. (2013).

Bark on the trunk of Prunus pananensis. Chen et al. (2013).

The approximate location of the Zhejiang Dapanshan National Nature Reserve. Google Maps.

The Huaxi Valley in the Zhejiang Dapanshan National Nature Reserve, where Prunus pananensis was discovered. Chen et al. (2013).

See also New species of Vochysia from Brazil and A new species of Custard Apple from the Western Ghats Mountains of India.

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